Wikistrat
bills itself as a ‘crowdsourced’ analysis agency based in Washington. But
interviews with current and former employees and documents tell a very
different story.

KENDALL
MCMINIMY/GETTY

In
the fall of 2016, Donald Trump Jr. and other key aides to the future
presidentreportedly
met in Trump Towerwith Joel Zamel, the
founder of a company called Wikistrat.

Wikistrat
bills itself as a “crowdsourced” geopolitical analysis firm based in
Washington, D.C. But interviews with current and former employees
and documents reviewed by The Daily Beast tell a different story:
that the vast majority of Wikistrat’s clients were foreign
governments; that Wikistrat is, for all intents and purposes, an
Israeli firm; and that the company’s work was not just limited to
analysis. It also engaged in intelligence collection.

Robert
Mueller’s office isinvestigatingWikistrat
and Zamel, according toThe Wall Street
Journal, as the special counsel’s probe expands into Middle
Eastern governments’ attempts to influence American politics.

Publicly,
Wikistrat touts its crowdsourcing interface it hasdescribed
as“Wikipedia meets Facebook” to develop
reports for clients. The documents also highlight Wikistrat’s heavy
reliance on “gamification”—applying game design features to
encourage user engagement—to solicit information from sources.
Former Wikistrat employees say its founder viewed himself as the
Mark Zuckerberg of the national-security world.

But
despite the firm’spurported
commitmentto “transparent, open-source
methodologies,” the documents provided to The Daily Beast show
something different: that the company exploits “in country…
informants” as sources.

And
according to internal Wikistrat documents marked “highly
confidential and sensitive material,” 74 percent of the firm’s
revenue came from clients that were foreign governments.

Although
Wikistrat’s clients were overwhelmingly foreign governments, the
company boasted incredible access to top U.S. military and
intelligence officials. The firm’sadvisory
councillists former CIA and National
Security Agency director Michael Hayden, former national security
adviser James L. Jones, former deputy director of the National
Security Council Elliott Abrams, and former acting director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency David Shedd, among others.

Perhaps
it’s no surprise, then, that the company’swebsiteis
adorned with the insignias of U.S. military agencies and that it
claims D.C. as its headquarters.

But
exactly how much of a connection these advisers have with the
company isn’t totally clear. “I have always been informal… but I
support the concept of their work (as my quote [on Wikistrat’s
website] points out),” Hayden told The Daily Beast in an email.
“There is no paperwork between us and I have never been to a board
meeting.”

A
former senior analyst for Wikistrat, James Kadtke, described his
experience with the company to The Daily Beast. A physicist by
training, Kadtke worked as a defense and technology adviser to Sen.
John Warner from 2002-05 and as a senior fellow at the National
Defense University before joining Wikistrat in 2016.

When
Kadtke first interviewed with a couple of Wikistrat executives to
discuss working for them, he said it became obvious to him that
there was more to this company than meets the eye.

“It
was clear to me that both of these guys had intelligence
backgrounds, intelligence professionals, not academics or analysts,”
Kadtke told The Daily Beast. “They were using their experts for
tacit information going on in various parts of the world. I got the
impression they were doing things outside of Wikistrat. It seemed
mysterious.”

Working
for Wikistrat didn’t seem to clear up Kadtke’s questions. Kadtke
said that, in retrospect, Wikistrat appeared to be more about
intelligence collection than anything else.

Elad
Schaffer, the Wikistrat CEO who succeeded Zamel this year, did not
respond to a request for comment.

Asked
about Kadtke’s remarks about intelligence collection, one former
high-ranking employee said, “Could he [Wikistrat’s founder] have
done this? Yes, by all means,” adding that Wikistrat’s work “was not
limited to geopolitics.”

HUSH
HUSH

The
documents provide rare insight into a company that Wikistrat
employees repeatedly described as extraordinarily secretive.

“Joel
ran a very compartmentalized organization,” one former high-ranking
staffer said.

“I
felt like I had no real visibility into what the company was really
doing,” another former senior employee said.

“He
was very secretive, everything was highly compartmentalized… It was
clear that he kept the entire company in the dark. Even [company
executives] didn’t have the whole picture,” a former employee said,
adding that if someone took a photo at a company gathering, Zamel
would leave the room.

“He
never allowed anyone to get near his phone, his laptop, stuff like
that.”

Even
in the internal company documents, which include a page about the
company’s leadership, photos of each of the executives are
included—except Zamel’s.

“I
suspected he was involved in other stuff simply because a man
without secrets doesn’t need to be secretive. If he had nothing to
hide, he would’ve been much more open. I thought he was involved in
other operations.”

THE
ISRAEL CONNECTION

If
Wikistrat was engaged in intelligence collection, an obvious
question arises: For whom?

Much
of the reporting so far has focused on Wikistrat’s relationship with
the United Arab Emirates. For instance,The
New York Timesrecently
reporteda secretive Trump Tower meeting
three months before the 2016 presidential election, between Donald
Trump Jr., Zamel, and George Nader, an emissary for the UAE. The
meetingdrew
comparisonto the infamous Trump Tower
meeting between Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a
Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.

Zamel
is reported to have pitched Trump Jr. on a social-media manipulation
strategy to help his father win the election. After Trump was
elected, Naderis
saidto have paid Zamel a large sum of
money—as much as $2 million.

In
light of the scrutiny of Zamel’s ties to the UAE, it’s natural that
news coverage would focus on that country. But Wikistrat may, in
fact, have stronger ties to Israel.

Zamel
is a citizen of Israel and master’sgraduateof
IDC Herzliya—a small, elite college that’s often compared to U.S.
Ivy League schools—where he studied government, diplomacy, and
strategy, specializing in counterterrorism and homeland security.

(The
internal documents reviewed by The Daily Beast confirm that Zamel
also owned the lion’s share—86 percent—of Wikistrat, with the next
biggest shareholder possessing less than 6 percent of the company.)

Though
Wikistrat’swebsite
listsits location as Washington, Kadtke
said the company was run out of Israel the entire time he worked
there.

A
former Wikistrat employee confirmed the company was run out of Tel
Aviv, with the D.C. office only handling sales and business
development, he said.

“He
knew a whole lot of people there [in Israel]. One of his connections
was the former head of the [Israeli] intelligence directorate, Amos
Yadlin.”

In
fact, each of Wikistrat’s principals listed Tel Aviv as their
address in a 2015 copy of Wikistrat’s Virginiabusiness
license.

Former
employees say that at the core of Wikistrat’s leadership were three
Israelis: Daniel Green, the CTO, Elad Schaffer, formerly the COO and
now the CEO, and Zamel, the founder and, until this year, its CEO.

“Those
people were very close, and it wasn’t just professional,” one former
employee said.

That
former employee added, “I had an initial conversation with Joel
where I said, ‘One of the issues you’re going to run into, if you
want to be focused on [U.S.] government work, you’re going to run
into problems every day because of the Israeli connection.’ He said,
‘Well, why is that? They’re amazing allies?’”

“There
were many conversations internally [about this]... Israel is one of
the top counterintelligence concerns for the U.S.”

One
of the internal documents reviewed by The Daily Beast lists a former
“major in [an] elite Israeli intelligence-analysis unit,” Shay
Hershkovitz, as its chief security officer and director of analytic
community. That document also describes Schaffer as a former
“counterterrorism officer for Israeli intelligence.”

“Elad
was involved in a very elite, select group of individuals performing
a very important mission… dealing with the height of the global war
on terrorism,” one former employee said. “He did some collaborative
work with U.S. special-operations counterparts who were working in
the Middle East to deal with threats coming from al Qaeda.”

“Elad
kept averylow profile.”

Schaffer
did not respond to a request for comment.

‘FLYNN
TOOK A REAL SHINING TO JOEL’

Zamel
apparently wanted former national security adviser Michael Flynn to
be a member of the firm’s advisory board; Zamel spoke with him about
it on multiple occasions around the time Flynn was forming his
ill-fated Flynn Intel Group, a former high-ranking Wikistrat
employee told The Daily Beast.

“Flynn
took a real shining to Joel,” the source said.

Another
former Wikistrat employee appeared to confirm Zamel’s links to
Flynn, saying a mutual contact, Adam Lovinger, helped introduce
Zamel to numerous Pentagon officials. Lovinger, a Pentagon
strategist and former Trump NSC analyst, had been named to the
National Security Council by Flynn and wasreportedlyassociated
with Flynn Intel Group.

Flynn
Intel Group would later be investigated by special counsel Robert
Mueller in connection to a $530,000 payment it received from a
company owned by a Turkish businessman close to Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Lovinger
told The Daily Beast that he had introduced Zamel to Pentagon
officials after a Navy commander brought him to the Pentagon’s
Office of Net Assessment.

“I
know both Joel and Mike Flynn, but I don’t know the extent of their
relationship,” Lovinger added.

Zamel
had apparently been introduced to Flynn by Bijan Kian, Flynn Intel
Group’s former vice chairman of its board of directors, according to
one source. Kian had been a partner at Flynn Intel Group and served
as point man on Flynn’s discussions with Zamel.

However,
shortly after this report’s publication, Mukasey confirmed via email
that Zamel had indeed communicated with Flynn. In an email to The
Daily Beast, Mukasey wrote: “Regarding Joel and Wikistrat, your
information and your statistics and your numbers and your
descriptions are flat-out wrong. You’ve been fed misinformation
(likely by a disgruntled ex-employee) or you’re simply making things
up. By way of example, there was one—and only one—conversation with
Flynn.”

BUT
WHY?

The
appeal of working with a high-profile intelligence officer like
Flynn is easy to see. What’s more opaque is why Zamel moved away
from harvesting “crowdsourced” intel to making foreign deals.

The
allure of quick and easy money from extravagantly wealthy Middle
East leadership figures, coupled with an increasingly personal
relationship with them, represented a “shiny object” that lured
Zamel away from Wikistrat’s original mission, a former senior
Wikistrat employee said.

And
although Zamel was rich, he might not have been wealthy enough to
float Wikistrat on his own.

“It
was never clear to me how much Joel was actually paying out of
pocket to subsidize the company vs. what was brought in,” another
former employee said. “Clients paid decently but not enough to
sustain the company. So Joel was either substantially funding the
company or we were getting money from somewhere else. That naturally
leads you to focus on non-U.S. sources of income.”

The
documents appear to corroborate this, showing that Wikistrat had
been losing large amounts of money. For example, an income statement
summary shows Wikistrat’s income as -$603,000 in 2013, -$110,000 in
2014, and a projected -$773,000 for 2016.

Kadtke
said that, toward the end of 2017, Wikistrat’s ordinary operations
(i.e., war games and analysis) went “way down.”

“Around
the beginning of 2017, the three people I knew there left very
abruptly… The last study on the website was January 2017 (they used
to do a lot). They seemed to have ceased operations,” Kadtke said.
“It was very strange to me that they just sort of collapsed. It was
probably a three-month period after which everyone I knew there
left.”